AsiaLIFE

It’s been nearly four decades since photojournalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone went missing in Cambodia. Now, as witnesses pass away and contacts whither, photographer Tim Page is launching one last search for his good friend, Sean Flynn. Words by Thomas Maresca, photos: IMMF degree south.

On April 6,1970, two American photographers, Sean Flynn, 28, and Dana Stone, 30, drove their rented Honda motorcycles towards a military blockade on Route One in eastern Cambodia, a few miles from the Vietnam border. Something big was going on. Armed conflict had erupted in Cambodia while Vietnam and the United States were in the midst of war, and the two friends, always among the most daring of the war correspondents, headed straight for the front lines in the neighbouring country.

This time, Flynn and Stone would not be coming back. Once across the border, they were held by North Vietnamese forces. Some imply that Flynn and Stone meant to be intercepted in order to capture the story, as it would have been impossible for them — or any foreign civilians — to pass through the border area without permission or oversight. Whatever the case, Flynn and Stone were never seen nor heard from again. What exactly happened to Dana Stone and Sean Flynn has remained one of the war’s lingering mysteries for nearly 40 years. That mystery is finally on the verge of being solved. New information and new sources have been found, and a major new attempt spearheaded by Flynn’s friend and fellow war correspondent Tim Page to retrace the final days and months of the two men is underway.

SON OF ROBIN HOOD IN VIETNAM

The war in Vietnam has been called the first media war, and the journalists and photographers who covered it — Robert Capa, David Halberstam, Peter Arnett, Seymour Hersh, Larry Burrows, Neil Davis and dozens of others — became larger-than-life figures. But none were quite like Sean Flynn. Six feet three inches (1.91 metres) tall, with the matinee idol looks and Hollywood glow of his legendary father Errol, he cut an unforgettable figure across the war zone. Flynn “blew minds all over Vietnam,” as Michael Herr writes in his classic memoir Dispatches.

Sean Flynn arrived in Vietnam in January 1966 as a freelance photojournalist for the French magazine Paris Match. The magazine itself treated his arrival as a celebrity stunt, trumpeting it with the headline “Son of Robin Hood in Vietnam.” Up until this point, Sean Flynn had more or less done the things expected of the son of a Hollywood icon. He had lived a playboy lifestyle, begun an acting career of his own (in B-movies such as Sign of Zorro and Son of Captain Blood), and had even tried his hand at big-game hunting in Africa.

But in Vietnam, Flynn quickly established himself as much more than a sightseeing dilettante. He was deeply drawn to the war, driven by some kind of impulse into its darkest corners. “Sean Flynn could look more incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had thirty years before as Captain Blood,” wrote Herr. “But sometimes he looked more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input!”

Maybe Flynn was trying to get out of his father’s shadow, maybe he was trying to prove something to his old man. But whatever motivated him, Flynn was willing to take the risks that few other photographers would, to disappear for long stretches at a time into the heaviest fighting, to live out in real life the danger and the adventure that his father had only lived on screen.

THE LAST SHOT

Flynn found a band of like-minded members of the press corps in Saigon. Among them were Michael Herr, who was writing for Esquire; UPI’s Joe Galloway; Dana Stone, a logger in Vermont before becoming a war photographer in Vietnam; and perhaps Flynn’s closest friend in Vietnam, the wild, reckless, unfettered Tim Page. Page was an adopted child who grew up in Kent, England and left home at 17 to make his way across Europe and India, eventually landing in Laos and then Vietnam where he too became a photojournalist.

It was Page who was supposed to have been the unlucky one. While Flynn and Dana Stone had each suffered hardly a scratch during the war, Page had an uncanny knack for getting severely wounded. In April 1969, he took so much shrapnel from a mine explosion that he was declared dead on arrival at hospital, and spent the next year recovering in New York and Los Angeles.

And yet, it is Page who is now back in HCM City four decades after Flynn and Stone disappeared, sitting in a small French restaurant on downtown Ngo Duc Ke Street, talking about his best friend. “This is my brother,” he says, trying to describe a bond that remains unbreakable even after all this time. “It’s a hard thing to describe what happens in war between men.”

With the help of friends and colleagues, like Dave MacMillan, who operates the Dogma propaganda art and fashion shop in HCM City, Page has launched the first new search for Flynn in years. He is following up old leads, acting on new information and trying to catch those who still may remember what happened to his friends. “I think it’s patently obvious that a lot of the leads — the human intelligence — are dying off,” says Page.“This is the last shot.”

A FALSE ASSUMPTION

It may be the last shot, but this isn’t the first time Page has tried to find out what happened to Flynn and Stone. In 1990, Page went to Cambodia and conducted a search, featured in his book 'Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden' and in the British television programme Danger on the Edge of Town.

Page’s investigation led him to the town of Sangke Kaong, where Stone and Flynn were held for a period of time before being turned over to the Khmer Rouge when Vietnamese forces left the area. From there, the trail leads to the town of Bei Met, where eyewitness accounts told of two western prisoners being killed in early 1971, and where a grave containing teeth and fillings was uncovered. Forensic tests indicated the teeth belonged to a tall man and a short man and that both had died violently.

Advanced DNA testing was still in its infancy at this point, and without any known samples to test against, it was impossible to say with certainty that these were the remains of Flynn and Stone. Page, however, felt that he had found his friends. “I was pretty sure in 1990-91, but there was still so much missing from the jigsaw puzzle,” Page says. “I made — I’ll cop to it — false presumptions. Obviously, I wanted resolution.”

After his search, Page went on to create Requiem, a photo essay book and exhibition with a permanent display at the HCM City War Remnants Museum that pays tribute to the combat photographers from every nation that died in Indochina.

NEW INFORMATION

Page’s original conclusion, however, didn’t stand up to the test of time. Earlier this decade, the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA), the Hawaii-based U.S. organisation that handles POW/MIA issues, was able to conclude that the teeth matched a different pair of western prisoners — Larry Humphrey and Clyde McKay. Humphrey had been a U.S. Army deserter, and McKay was one of a pair of mutineers who overtook the Columbia Eagle, a merchant vessel carrying napalm to the U.S. air bases in Thailand. McKay and his partner Alvin Glatkowski (later extradited to the United States) took control of the ship as an anti-war protest and brought it to Cambodia.

They expected to be welcomed as heroes, but were instead arrested by U.S.-backed forces loyal to Lon Nol days after they arrived. McKay escaped imprisonment and sought out the Khmer Rouge. He was never seen again. Based on the DNA samples and other evidence, Humphrey and McKay were taken off the MIA list by the JTF (which is now known as JPAC, the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command).

The organisation further concluded that one of the samples may in fact belong to Dana Stone, based on the DNA supplied by his brother Tom, a U.S. Army medic killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2006. The match was not conclusive, but it has been enough to have Stone removed from the priority list of MIAs. Sean Flynn remains on the list.

In 2001, Zalin Grant, an army officer and a Time and New Republic correspondent during the war, conducted his own search for Flynn and Stone. He concluded that the two were most likely kept alive until 1975, and were executed in Kratie. In 2002, another theory saw the light of day. In Jeffrey Meyer’s dual biography Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam, the author puts forward the suggestion that Flynn was in fact suffering from malaria and had been taken to a hospital in June 1971, where he was given a lethal injection. Meyers did not know where the hospital was. This theory is based on a never-published 1974 interview of a Khmer Rouge cadre who was present at the alleged execution, by AP reporter Matt Franjola. Tim Page was given a transcript of the interview in the late 1990s by Franjola, but did not follow up on it at the time.

PUTTING SPIRITS TO REST

Page couldn’t leave the case alone, however. Or perhaps the memories of Sean Flynn wouldn’t leave Tim Page alone. Last year, after having surgery to treat old war injuries, the photographer said that images of Flynn started coming to him. “I had a dream about him,” says Page. “He’s sitting on my shoulder, waiting to be found.”
 
Page started digging into this last theory — that Flynn had in fact come down with a serious case of malaria, and was killed by an injection at a hospital, either in an attempt to save his life or as a means of execution. Page and his colleagues in Cambodia and Vietnam have since come across numerous promising leads, from newly-uncovered documents from the international NGO Document Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) to insider “Deep Throat” tips to Vietnamese and Cambodians with relevant information.

The group is now convinced that they have found the coordinates of the former hospital, in Kampong Cham. The information is so promising that British television and film production house Wall to Wall is sending a team to Cambodia this month to start work on a documentary film about Page’s search. It’s scheduled to be shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins (Kundun, The Reader, Revolutionary Road).

Page is also working on a book about his new search, tentatively called “Bones of Contention.” He says he’s motivated not just to find Flynn’s remains, but to piece as much of the story together as possible. “What was it like to have been a POW under the Khmer Rouge for over a year, underneath the heaviest bombing campaign in history?” Page says. “What was it like to be living on a handful of rice and a chicken bone under a B-52 bomb strike? What’s it like on the ground when you’ve lost your hearing and you’re stumbling around with blood coming out of your ears?”

Just as this issue of AsiaLIFE Guide was going to press, Page and his researchers came across a document that is the strongest piece of evidence yet to support the lethal injection theory — a Khmer Rouge official report on the killing which lists heretofore unknown details. It could well be the key to unlock the entire mystery of Sean Flynn. And for Sean Flynn’s best friend, Tim Page, it will mean something more than just solving a mystery.

“I was about to die here in the hospital,” he says at the French restaurant in HCM City. “Sean came all the way from Laos and brought me a Buddha. I can’t quantifiably say that that helped save my life, but I think there is a bearing therein. It’s part of that payback.” Page goes on: “When I drive [in Cambodia], I’m in tears, I can feel him. He’s calling out, ‘Come and find me.’ It makes me feel almost stupid saying it like that. But a spirit needs a shrine, it needs a place to come home to.”

Tim Page is on the verge of finding that place one that may put both his and Sean Flynn’s spirits to rest. AsiaLIFE Guide will be following the story of Tim Page’s search for the truth about what happened to Sean Flynn in an upcoming issue.